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When I was a kid we always had a jar of hot fudge sauce in the fridge. I think it might have been Smuckers brand, and whenever we had ice cream we’d heat the jar up in the microwave and ladel huge spoonfuls of fudge on top.

I hadn’t had hot fudge in ages when this memory hit me a while back and I decided I wanted to keep a stash of vegan sauce handy like we had in my childhood. This recipe is based off the one in Joy of Vegan Baking and is super easy, chocolatey, and adaptable.

Combine dry ingredients in saucepan. Add milk and cornstarch. Heat to boiling and simmer a few minutes with constant stirring until thickened. Remove from heat, stir in margarine and vanilla. Store in a sealed jar in the fridge.

We had a late night hankering for chocolate chip cookies and made my favorite recipe. As an added bonus it just happens to be whole wheat too! I use either flax meal or Ener-G in place of egg and Earth Balance or homemade margarine in place of butter. If you use Earth Balance, I’d use 3/4 cup instead of a full cup or it’ll be too greasy.

Usually I just use plain chocolate chips (Ghirardelli or Guittard semi sweet) but this time I did half white chocolate chips. So good! I got these from Vegan Haven in Seattle and they’re the best vegan white chips I’ve found.

Holiday weekends mean brunch time! Mr. HVC wanted pancakes for breakfast this morning and before he could finish saying the word I was already pulling out my worn copy of Vegan with a Vengeance. It’s a simple recipe but definitely makes the best vegan pancakes I’ve ever had. It’s also really easily modified — I’ve used lots of different flours, fruit, nuts, and extracts and they come out great every time!

I always use white whole wheat flour and add in a handful of chopped walnuts. When I’m down to the last bit of batter I dump in some semi sweet chocolate chips to make my favorite breakfast treat 🙂

Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday of the year so I always try to do something special. This year we did a bunch of new stuff, which included checking out a new haunted house, trunk or treating, and seeing a special Halloween concert in SF.

Trunk or Treat is basically a way for parents to provide a safe space for their kids to celebrate Halloween. A lot of churches do it because it’s an alternative for parents who don’t want to send their kids out to strangers’ houses on Halloween plus they can control how spooky everything is. The parents line up their cars and sit in their Halloween-bedazzled trunks, handing out candy. Since everyone knows each other, you can totally make homemade sweeties to hand out instead of pre-packaged candy! I’m usually stuck buying the “boring” (i.e., non-chocolate) candy for Halloween, since the cheap chocolate is full of dairy (and slavery!) and the fair-trade/vegan stuff is way too expensive.

I didn’t have a lot of time to make stuff so I opted for chocolate-covered pretzel logs (with vegan Halloween sprinkles!) and caramel popcorn balls.

They came out great! I put the pretzel logs in special bagse you can find at any craft store. I also had Sour Patch Kids and Swedish fish, but the homemade stuff was the first to disappear! In fact, I think the pretzels were gone in the first 10 minutes 🙂

The next day we went into San Francisco to go see a Halloween performance of The Phantom of the Opera. Of course, if we were in the city we had to check out a new vegan restaurant!

There’s been some buzz on the PPK about a new vegetarian Thai restaurant, Thai Idea. There’s also a good review of the place in SF Weekly.

Everything was good! The restaurant was super cute and all the entrees were under $10. The service was really attentive, too. I recommend the firecracker balls. They tasted a little fishy from the nori and they were served with a delicious sweet chili sauce. The Massaman curry was one of the best I’ve ever had (and I’ve had a lot!). The Pad Thai was just ok…it needed more zip but I’m also really picky about my Pad Thai. We were hoping they’d have mango sticky rice for dessert, but instead they offered deep fried bananas with coconut ice cream. As good as that sounded, I was only in the mood for mango so we passed.

Yay for a great new Thai restaurant (sans fish sauce!) and yay for Halloween!